Issa on Labor nominee: This president picks people because they support his ideology over the rule of law

posted at 5:21 pm on March 19, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

Oh, yeah — this guy is definitely gonna’ be getting some pushback. House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa breaks it down, via the WFB:

You remember, he flew to St. Paul to make this deal. He basically paid a $180 million bribe by causing these cases to collapse. He failed to protect the individuals who had valid claims. And Megyn, back to the important part: If in fact the city of St. Paul and other cities around America are not guilty of discrimination, they’re trying to do their job, they’ve created an open environment, and environment envisioned in our Constitution, but they’re finding themselves falling, if you will, back on this whole question of, ‘You’ve got to hit certain numbers, you’ve got to force the numbers,’ that was a very legitimate question for the Supreme Court. And again, this is a president who picks people to promote because they support his ideology rather than the rule of law.

Senators Grassley and Vitter have already raised red flags about Thomas Perez’s nomination for the Secretary of Labor position because of his sketchy involvement in this and several other cases, and Vitter vowed to block the process without some answers; as Issa describes, what look an awful lot like repeated refusals to fully and faithfully fulfill his job duties for the sake of political gain are seriously suspect (but then, his bosses are Eric Holder and Barack Obama, so… yeah).

Here’s the WSJ piece to which Megyn Kelly refers; read on for the opprobrious details:

Consider how Mr. Perez worked behind the scenes to undermine two civil cases against the City of St. Paul in order to stop a Supreme Court case that might have repudiated his discrimination enforcement theories.

These columns first reported on the curious St. Paul episode in February 2012 (“Squeezed in St. Paul”), after the Minnesota city withdrew a case that it had spent almost a decade litigating and that the U.S. Supreme Court had already agreed to hear. We’ve since learned more about how it happened, and we’ve seen emails that illustrate the strong-arm role played by Mr. Perez in his current job as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. It’s a story of how political muscle undermined the rule of law. …